Chinese writing system

Traditional (left) and simplified (right) Chinese for the word hànzì.

Written Chinese (Chinese: 中文; pīnyīn: zhōngwén) comprises the written symbols used to represent spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated. These symbols are commonly known as Chinese characters (traditional/simplified Chinese: 漢字/汉字; pinyin: hànzì). Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, each character generally represents either a complete one-syllable word (see logogram) or a single-syllable part of a word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation.

Written Chinese is considered to be one of the world's oldest active, continuously used writing systems (cf."History of the Alphabet" citation below). Many current Chinese characters have been traced back to the 商 Shāng Dynasty about 1500 BCE, and the process of creating characters probably began some centuries earlier. Chinese characters were standardized under the 秦 Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.

Despite historical changes in pronunciation, Chinese speakers in disparate dialect groups can communicate in writing. Some of the characters have also been adopted as part of the writing systems in other East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: Educated Chinese know about 4,000, while educated Japanese know about half that many. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

Structure

A 12th century Song Dynasty redaction of the Shuōwén Jiězì.

Written Chinese is not based predominantly on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. Occasionally, a character consists of only one component; more commonly, two or more components are combined, using a variety of different principles, to form more complex characters. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the 說文解字/说文解字 Shuōwén Jiězì, compiled by 許慎/许慎 Xǔ Shèn around 120 CE. Since Xu Shen did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis cannot always be taken as authoritative. Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the Shuowen Jiezi in terms of breadth, and it is still relevant to etymological research today.

According to the Shuowen Jiezi, Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles. (These principles, though popularized by the Shuowen Jiezi, were developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the 周禮/周礼 Zhōulǐ—literally, "Rites of Zhou"—a text from about 150 BCE.) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as 文 wén:

1. 象形 xiàngxíng: Pictographs, in which the character is a graphical depiction of the object it denotes. Examples: 人 rén "person", 日 rì "sun", 木 mù "tree/wood".
2. 指事 zhǐshì: Indicatives, or ideographs, in which the character represents an abstract notion. Examples: 上 shàng "up", 下 xià "down", 三 sān "three".

The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called 字 zì (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:

3. 會意/会意 huìyì: Logical aggregates, in which two or more parts are used for their meaning. This yields a composite meaning, which is then applied to the new character. Example: 東/东 dōng "east", which represents a sun rising in the trees.
4. 形聲/形声 xíngshēng: Phonetic complexes, in which one part—often called the radical—indicates the general semantic category of the character (such as water-related or eye-related), and the other part is another character, used for its phonetic value. Example: 晴 qíng "clear/fair (weather)", which is composed of 日 rì "sun", and 青 qīng "blue/green", which is used for its pronunciation.

In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95 percent of the characters in the Shuowen Jiezi) are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes. In fact, some phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example is 炷 zhù "candle", which was originally a pictograph 主, a character that is now pronounced zhǔ and means "host". The character 火 huǒ "fire" was added to indicate that the meaning is fire-related.

The last two principles do not produce new written forms; instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:

5. 轉注/转注 zhuǎnzhù: Transference, in which a character, often with a simple, concrete meaning takes on an extended, more abstract meaning. Example: 網/网 wǎng "net", which was originally a pictograph depicting a fishing net. Over time, it has taken on an extended meaning, covering any kind of lattice; for instance, it can be used to refer to a computer network.
6. 假借 jiǎjiè: Borrowing, in which a character is used, either intentionally or accidentally, for some entirely different purpose. Example: 哥 gē "older brother", which is written with a character originally meaning "song/sing", now written 歌 gē. Once, there was no character for "older brother", so an otherwise unrelated character with the right pronunciation was borrowed for that meaning.

Chinese characters are generally written to fit into a square (except for simple characters such as 一 yī "one" for which this is not possible), even when they are composed of two simpler forms written side by side or top to bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed appropriately so that the entire character continues to fit into a square.

Layout

Street sign in Central, Hong Kong. The top line runs left-to-right, the middle line runs right-to-left, and the bottom line runs left-to-right.

Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not usually linked to one another, so they can be written in any direction in a square grid. Traditionally, Chinese is written in vertical columns from top to bottom; the first column is on the right side of the page, and the text runs toward the left. Text written in Classical Chinese also uses little or no punctuation. In such cases, sentence and phrase breaks are determined by context and rhythm.

In modern times, the familiar Western layout of horizontal rows from left to right, read from the top of the page to the bottom, has become more popular, especially in the People's Republic of China (mainland China); the government there mandated left-to-right writing in 1955. The Republic of China (Taiwan) followed suit in 2004. Punctuation has also become more prevalent, whether the text is written in columns or rows. The punctuation marks are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Chinese: for example, the double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」); the hollow period (。), which is otherwise used just like an ordinary full stop; and a special kind of comma called an enumeration comma (、), which is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence.

Signs are often a particularly challenging aspect of written Chinese layout, since they can be written either left to right or right to left (the latter can be thought of as the traditional layout with each "column" being one character high), as well as from top to bottom. It is not unusual to encounter all three orientations on signs on neighboring stores.

Evolution

In 2003, tentative evidence was found at 賈湖/贾湖 Jiǎhú, an archaeological site in the 河南 Hénán province of China, for an early form of Chinese writing. Some symbols were found that bear striking resemblance to certain modern characters, such as 目 mù "eye". Since the Jiahu site dates from about 6600 BCE, it predates the earliest confirmed Chinese writing by about 4,000 years. The nature of this finding—whether it represents true writing (that is, a general mechanism for expression) or simply proto-writing (which comprises a limited set of symbols)—is still disputed. Critics contend that if the Jiahu finding really represented a direct ancestor of modern Chinese writing, it would indicate that Chinese writing remained relatively static for three millennia, at a time when China was sparsely populated.

Replica of an ancient Chinese oracle bone.

The first indisputable examples of Chinese writing, dating back to the Shāng Dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BCE, are the oracle bones (primarily ox scapulae and turtle shells), originally used for divination. Characters were inscribed on the bones in order to frame a query; the bones were then heated over a fire, and the resulting cracks were interpreted to determine the answer to the query. Such characters are called 甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén "shell-bone script" or oracle bone script.

Left: Bronze 方樽 fāngzūn ritual wine container dated about 1000 BCE. The written inscription cast in bronze on the vessel commemorates a gift of cowrie shells in 周 Zhōu Dynasty society. Right: Bronze 方彝 fāngyí ritual container dated about 1000 BCE. An inscription of some 180 Chinese characters appears twice on the vessel, commenting on state rituals that accompanied a court ceremony.

After the Shāng Dynasty, Chinese writing evolved into the form found on bronzeware made during the Western 周 Zhōu Dynasty (c 1066–770 BCE) and the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE), a kind of writing called 金文 jīnwén "metal script". Jinwen characters are less angular and angularized than the oracle bone script. Later, in the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE), the script became still more regular, and settled on a form, called 六國文字/六国文字 liùguó wénzì "script of the six states", that Xu Shen used as source material in the Shuowen Jiezi. These characters were later embellished and stylized to yield the 篆書/篆书 zhuànshū seal script, which represents the oldest form of Chinese characters surviving to modern use. They are used principally for signature seals, or chops, which are often used in place of a signature, for Chinese documents and artwork. During the Qin dynasty, 李斯 Lǐ Sī promulgated the seal script as the standard throughout the empire, then newly unified.

Seal script, in turn, evolved into the other surviving writing styles. Clerical script (隸書/隶书 lìshū) developed first, after the seal script. In general, clerical script characters are "flat" in appearance, being wider than the seal script, which tends to be taller than it is wide. Compared with the seal script, clerical script characters are strikingly rectilinear. In running script (行書/行书 xíngshū), a semi-cursive form, the character parts begin to run into each other, although the characters themselves generally remain separate. There are some conventions in which characters deviate from their canonical forms in a consistent manner. Running script eventually evolved into grass script (草書/草书 cǎoshū), a fully cursive form, in which the characters are often entirely unrecognizable by their canonical forms. Grass script gives the impression of anarchy in its appearance, and there is indeed considerable freedom on the part of the calligrapher, but this freedom is circumscribed by conventional "abbreviations" in the forms of the characters. Regular script (楷書/楷书 kǎishū), a non-cursive form, is the most widely recognized script. In regular script, each stroke of each character is clearly drawn out from the others. Even though both the running and grass scripts appear to be derived as semi-cursive and cursive variants of regular script, it is in fact the regular script that was the last to develop.

Regular script is considered the archetype for Chinese writing, and forms the basis for most printed forms. In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly. (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character 木 mù "wood" must be written starting with the horizontal stroke, drawn from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom, with a small hook toward the upper left at the end; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom.

Simplified and traditional Chinese

In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called 簡體字/简体字 jiǎntǐzì (simplified Chinese) and 繁體字/繁体字 fántǐzì (traditional Chinese). Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China has claimed that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.

The simplified forms have also been criticized for being inconsistent. For instance, traditional 讓 ràng "allow" is simplified to 让, in which the phonetic on the right side is reduced from 17 strokes to just three. (The speech radical on the left has also been simplified.) However, the same phonetic is used in its full form, even in simplified Chinese, in such characters as 壤 rǎng "soil" and 齉 nàng "snuffle"; these forms remained uncontracted because they were relatively uncommon and would therefore represent a negligible stroke reduction. On the other hand, some simplified forms are simply calligraphic abbreviations of long standing, as for example 万 wàn "ten thousand", for which the traditional Chinese form is 萬.

Simplified Chinese is standard in the People's Republic of China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese is retained in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and overseas Chinese communities (except Singapore and Malaysia). Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first.